


Prompt: Barton Babysitting

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [49]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Babysitting, Codependency, Discussion of Jealousy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 09:11:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6278470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You are jealous,” Pietro says. “That he gets the attention and you and Cooper do not.”</p><p>Lila’s gaze is wary. “Yes,” she mumbles. “So?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Barton Babysitting

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/141226894850/its-okay-the-other-prompt-i-had-was-to-have).

**i.**  
Pietro still didn’t entirely know why Clint Barton was so willing to trust them, but it didn’t seem to stop the fact that it was true. After the first time that Clint had asked them to babysit his children while he and Laura went into town so Nathaniel could have his check up Pietro had glanced to Wanda in shock.

 _He trusts us_ , she had sent back, and shrugged. “We can do it,” she had said.

“Right, thank you,” Clint had said. “$10 an hour all right for pay?”

“We get paid?” Pietro had said. He still isn’t certain why that made Clint laugh.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.  
** Lila and Cooper are, for the most part, easy to handle. They don’t know the specifics of Clint’s job, but they know enough, and evidently Clint has told them who they are, told them of their powers, so Cooper jumps up and tries to convince Pietro to run with him, while Lila watches Wanda through narrowed eyes and asks if she really _can_  make things explode.

“Sometimes,” Wanda says. “But I do not think your father would want the house destroyed.”

Lila nods at that. “Can you do other things then?”

Wanda smiles, sends scarlet darting out and pieces together the Lego and Duplo on the floor into a tower. “Like that?” she asks.

“ _Wow_ ,” Lila breathes.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Pietro doesn’t like carrying people other than Wanda, but racing Cooper is simple enough. It has the added benefit of, when Clint and Laura will be gone the whole day, tiring the boy out, saving them the trouble of wrangling him as well as his sister when bedtime comes. Lila alone is tricky enough.

“This is what it must have been like for people dealing with us,” Pietro comments one evening, when they are sat on the sofa watching television as they wait for Clint and Laura to return. His words are soft Sokovian and Wanda leans into his side as he speaks. “Me running about, you playing your own tricks. Its not so different.”

“We did not have a third, though,” Wanda says. “They have their new brother.”

“No,” Pietro says. “Our parents died before that could happen.”

The rest of the evening is quiet and oddly sombre, but Pietro’s mind still keeps the link he made.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Sometimes, instead of Pietro racing Cooper and Wanda playing with Lila they swap. Lila is incessantly curious, and while Wanda’s scarlet is enough to ease that much of the time, when it is Pietro’s turn to wrangle her she is filled with questions instead, about Sokovia, about Novi Grad-that-was, about the language and the culture and everything in between. Pietro does his best to answer what he can.

Wanda handling Cooper is amusing to watch, managing to make him pause with only an expression. “Fine,” Cooper will mumble when Wanda’s eyebrow raises, and kick his shoes over gravel while Lila, on the veranda, sticks her tongue out at him.

“He’s a sensible boy,” Wanda says to Pietro in the evenings, when they wait for Laura and Clint. “I think he is just upset that his parents spend so much time with his little brother.”

Pietro shrugs. “Lila isn’t,” he offers and Wanda shakes her head.

“Lila _doesn’t seem to be_. She is as good at hiding things from others as you.”

It worries Pietro, that Wanda knows that of him, that he will hide things about himself from her if he thinks they will cause her worry. All the same she never seems to probe too deeply into his mind, never seeks to find out what it is he hides. She knows, in the end, either Pietro will tell her or it will cease to matter.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
The team still won’t let Pietro train - they think that, so long gone as he was, he will need at least as long to heal - but Wanda is allowed to, and runs herself ragged doing so. The evening that Pietro hears Lila trying to sneak downstairs Wanda is curled up fast asleep beside him, her mind a peaceful lake of scarlet.

“Lila,” he calls, sing-song. “I know it is you.”

There is the noise of _stillness_ , the moment where Lila is holding her breath until all she can hear is her heartbeat.

“I know you are there,” he says again, and the smile in his voice is audible. “Do not make me wake Wanda and catch you.”

Lila emerges from the doorway, head down, shoulders hunched. “I wanted to see when mom and dad came back,” she mutters, and Pietro gestures to the space beside him.

“So you sneak downstairs?”

“They’re always dealing with Nathaniel!” she blurts, and beside Pietro Wanda shifts at the noise. Lila looks abashed and quietens. “They probably wouldn’t even notice.”

Pietro stays quiet, strokes his hand through Wanda’s hair.

“It’s not fair,” Lila mumbles. “All he does is eat and poop and scream. He’s _boring_. Why does he get all the attention?”

Pietro sighs. He’s never quite understood this, the jealousy of the elder sibling for the younger, but then Wanda is only twelve minutes younger. There had never been this gap, this split of attention until they were ten and their parents dead. He presses a kiss to Wanda’s hair.

“Wanda is younger than me,” he says softly, instead. Lila looks at him with wide eyes. “Twelve minutes younger,” he says, “To be precise.”

Lila’s face falls. “That’s _nothing_. You wouldn’t even _notice_  that.”

“We did not notice,” Pietro agrees. “But having a younger sibling is not a bad thing.”

The _humph_  Lila gives reminds Pietro painfully of how he’d been at her age.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
“You are jealous,” Pietro says. “That he gets the attention and you and Cooper do not.”

Lila’s gaze is wary. “Yes,” she mumbles. “So?”

“When we first gained our powers I was jealous of Wanda.”

The frown Lila gives is not doubtful so much as confused.

“I kept running into the walls,” he explains. “They gave Wanda sedatives so she could not hear minds - she always heard mine though - and she could move things with her scarlet. All I could do...” he waves a hand, and Lila’s head tilts. “I kept running into walls.”

“Like Roadrunner,” Lila offers, and Pietro almost laughs.

“Yes,” he says, and for a while there is quiet. “Look,” he says eventually. “It is hard to be jealous of a sibling. It is never good. Wanda and I - we worked through it. We always do. Look at us now. I have protected her since we were ten years old, and she brought me back from the dead. Family is... you cannot always chose it-” (the Avengers, Pietro thinks, have _made_  themselves family) “-but what you have, it is worth valuing. Wanda and I are only two. Think what you and Cooper _and_  Nathaniel could do together.”

Lila places her thumbnail between her teeth, and looks distinctly thoughtful. “We could take over the world,” she says eventually, with all the determination of her age. And then, not ten seconds later: “Can I stay up til mom and dad get home?”

“Alright,” Pietro says, and he is smiling, almost laughing, and it is enough to make Wanda stir against his side again. “Let us make plans for you and your brothers to take over the world. Who is in charge?”

Lila looks at him as though he is an idiot. “Me, _obviously_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very much appreciated!


End file.
